Recently an older couple’s GPS system guided them down a remote, impassable forest road on their way from Portland to Reno. They ended up stranded in eastern Oregon in a foot and a half of snow for three days.
I also feel let down by technology this week. As I mentioned in a recent post, my Internet connection was down for over a week. Last Wednesday I was thrilled to finally have it up again, almost giddy.
Then my computer crashed.
The infamous Windows “blue screen of death” popped up … then blackness. I restarted the computer and was greeted by: “Missing Operating System.”
We rushed the computer to some local computer wizards, and we’re hoping they’ll be able to recover some of what we lost. (No, we did not have everything backed up.)
Of course, I vow to be better about backing up my hard drive from now on, but this whole dreadful episode left me with a few other things too:
- Clear priorities
The first thing I thought of when the blue screen popped up wasn’t my work, or even the two novels I’ve written and rewritten and rewritten again, which resided there on that crashing hard drive…* It was an adorable series of photos of my son in a terry-cloth frog robe that I took when he was about nine months old. A lot of the photos of our son are stored in other places. But the frog-robe photos and quite a few others will be lost forever if those computer wizards can’t recover them, and that’s heart breaking.
On the other hand, the pictures I still have of my son have suddenly taken on a lot more meaning, and I have new plans to organize them into albums.
(*Yes, I backed up those novels, although I may have lost some more recent edits.)
- Mission: downsize the data.
Part of the reason I was not as good at backing up my hard drive as I should have been is because there was just so much data on there — non-essential documents, blurry photos, outdated information, etc.
I lost some things I wish I still had. But what surprises me is that I also feel a bit lighter without all the junk that was on there. I’m on a new mission to keep my hard drive from becoming a dumping ground again – to only keep data that’s meaningful, to delete all those blurry photos, and to regularly purge outdated files.
- Mission: Organize the data
Starting afresh has some other benefits. I’m already being much more systematic about the way I store my computer files, and I plan to keep it that way.
This whole episode has made me realize that the stuff contained in my computer files is not that different from the other stuff in my life. It can be tempting to keep everything, since there are so many more gigabytes of space to store it in these days. But virtual baggage is still baggage.
I’m ready to pare down, to simplify, and to organize.
(This post is for Steady Mom’s Thirty Minute Blog Challenge.)
Great advice! Thanks for the tips. Sometimes I feel technology is a neccesary evil!!!
It’s always refreshing to get rid of clutter, no matter where it lies.
Thanks for the reminder of what’s important……& the thing I so often forget is that real life is calling while I am on the computer. I needed to remember that this monring, so thanks!
oh technology, a blessing and a curse. it definitely is easy to get distracted. i have to really force myself to think about “this is what I’m going to the computer to do” to avoid just wandering aimlessly in cyberdom.
i did a computer purge a few months back…went through and listened to every song and every photo on my computer and got rid of things i didn’t like all that much. took a long time, but it was worth it to clear up extra space for new things and to help my computer run better.
That’s definitely the way to go… purge and back up before the computer crashes. Next time, next time…..
As we continue to scale down the physical possessions we’ve collected over the years, I still have a hard time cleaning out our collection of digital photos.
Out of fear of losing our photos, I started saving them to flickr. The peace of mind I gained was worth the one-year membership cost (due to quantity of photos I uploaded).
Yes, I think I’m going to start putting the important photos on flickr too (and get rid of the unimportant ones). I’ve struggled a bit with how much of my son’s life I should put online. But now I’m clinging to those photos that I’ve posted in various places, so I’m rethinking my earlier reservations. Such a learning process.
Oh, I can so relate!!! This happened to me last December. And I lost some of the journal that I’ve been writing for my sons. I was so heartbroken but it definitely made me back up things better and like you said I have learned to scale back some.
I’m so sorry you lost your journal, Jennifer. I feel like I should start a computer-crash support group. Oh, the things we’ve lost. But I’m trying to remember that there are lessons here about paring down and letting go.
Isn’t it lovely, in retrospect, to lose a whole lot of stuff on our computers… and how quickly it build up!!! 30 emails becomes 3000 in the blink of an eye. Every now and then I have a great big purge… it is so much nicer to look at things when they aren’t surrounded by junk!!!! thanks for the reminder I need to tackle this again… Have a great week!!!
So sorry and thanks for the reminders about backing up and dealing with the clutter. I faintly remember vowing to do better several years ago and somehow that became a faint memory after a few years of diligence. When my now 9yr old was a tiny tot, our computer crashed. It wasn’t backed up. We lost his entire first year in pictures. Gone. Just like that. We have a few that were somehow salvaged and a few from grandparents, but over a thousand pictures gone forever. I hope you are able to recover at least the most important stuff!
Thanks for your kind words. I’m so sorry you lost your son’s photos.
Weird. I didn’t mean that to be anonymous, I thought I had posted my info. I was just reading your most recent post and then realized that my comment was left anon.